Originally created in 2004, Prometheus is a project of University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Prometheus is designed to create an informal outlet for news, information, and opinion on science and technology policy.
August media attention to climate change and global warming was up 20% throughout the world from the previous month of July, and up almost 83% from August 2018.
At the country level, of note Australian coverage was up nearly 62%, Canadian coverage was up nearly 38%, United States (US) coverage was up over 32% and New Zealand coverage was up slightly by just over 3%.
August media attention to climate change and global warming was up 20% throughout the world from the previous month of July, and up almost 83% from August 2018. At the regional level, from the previous month of July 2019 coverage in Asia was up nearly 14%, the European Union was up nearly 6%, North American coverage was up just over 32%, Latin American coverage was up almost 53%, African coverage was up over 8% and Oceania coverage was up approximately 33%. At the country level, of note Australian coverage was up nearly 62%, Canadian coverage was up nearly 38%, United States (US) coverage was up over 32% and New Zealand coverage was up slightly by just over 3%.
Figure 1 shows trends in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January 2004 through July 2019.
For a second straight month, ecological and meteorological content significantly shaped overall media coverage. Of note, in early August TheWashington Post published a set of analyses of how climate change has impacted communities and counties around the United States (US). Washington Post journalists Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens reported, “Over the past two decades, the 2 degrees Celsius number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth’s average temperature increases “well below” 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes. The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all the world’s coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear. But global warming does not heat the world evenly. A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark. Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark. Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 2 degrees Celsius. Other parts of the Northeast — New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts — trail close behind. While many people associate global warming with summer’s melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states”.
Figure 2. Word cloud showing frequency of words invoked in media coverage of climate change or global warming in United States newspaper sources in August (top left) – from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post – Canadian sources (top right) – from The Globe and Mail,The Toronto Star, and National Post, as well as Australian sources (bottom left) – from The Sydney Morning Herald, Courier Mail & Sunday Mail, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, and The Age, and New Zealand sources (bottom right) – from The New ZealandHerald, The Dominion Post, and The Press.
In August, media coverage also focused on the record-breaking heat from the month before. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that July 2019 was the hottest month of any month on record on planet Earth. NOAA also reported that June 2019 was the hottest June on record. Many news stories covered these milestones. For example, journalist Sophie Lewis from CBS News reported, “This summer hasn’t just felt like the hottest ever — it actually has been. July 2019 is now officially the hottest month on record, since record-keeping began 140 years ago. The average global temperature last month was 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Thursday. It follows the hottest June ever recorded, marking one of the hottest summers in recent history. Previously, July 2016 held the record for the hottest month ever. As of now, 2019 is tied with 2017 as the second-warmest year on record”. Meanwhile, journalist Robert Lee Hotz from The Wall Street Journal wrote “This past July was the hottest month world-wide in more than a century of global record-keeping, with severe heat waves in Europe, Africa and parts of the U.S. boosting the overall global average temperature”.
Also in August, wildfires in the Amazon – and their links to a changing climate – generated global media attention. An increase of 83% from the previous year had many asking questions and connecting the dots between Brazilian forest management and climate change. For example, BBC reported, “Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has seen a record number of fires this year, new space agency data suggests. The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) said its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018. It comes weeks after President Jair Bolsonaro sacked the head of the agency amid rows over its deforestation data. The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming. It is also home to about three million species of plants and animals, and one million indigenous people”. Meanwhile, journalist N’dea Yancey-Bragg from theUSA Today wrote, “Forest fires in the Amazon are generating smoke that can be seen from space and may have caused a daytime blackout more than 1,700 miles away in the country’s largest city. In the middle of the day Monday, the sky above São Paulo was blanketed by smoke from the wildfires raging in the Amazon region, according to local media reports. The smoke resulting from some of these wildfires was also captured in satellite images released by NASA last week”.
Moreover, as the fires continued through August, media reports covered how Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was mishandling the ongoing situation. Among numerous stories, journalist Marcelo Silva de Sousa, reporting for the Associated Press, wrote, “Amid global concern about raging fires in the Amazon, Brazil’s government complained Thursday that it is being targeted in smear campaign by critics who contend President Jair Bolsonaro is not doing enough to curb widespread deforestation. The threat to what some call “the lungs of the planet” has ignited a bitter dispute about who is to blame during the tenure of a leader who has described Brazil’s rainforest protections as an obstacle to economic development and who traded Twitter jabs on Thursday with France’s president over the fires. French President Emmanuel Macron called the wildfires an international crisis and said the leaders of the Group of 7 nations should hold urgent discussions about them at their summit …” Journalist Erik Ortiz from NBC News reported, “Environmental groups have blamed the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in January, for rolling back environmental protections that have paved the way for the illegal clearing of forests in favor of cattle farming and agriculture. On Wednesday, Bolsonaro posted a video to Facebook blaming nongovernmental organizations for setting the blazes as a tactic to malign him, although he provided no evidence for the claim”. Read more …
University of Colorado Boulder’s Art and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology (ASSETT) has just announced Beth Osnes as a new faculty advisor. An Associate Professor of Theatre, Beth brings to the position a long history of innovative and unique projects involving students, technology, and faculty from other disciplines, particularly faculty involved in environmental studies. See, for example, several projects she has completed with Inside the Greenhouse and Speak World.
We are happy to share with you another update regarding our ongoing efforts in the spaces of research, teaching and engagement in the spaces of creative climate communications in the public sphere.
In newsletter #14, we share some highlights of our many ongoing activities. Visit our website for further details and more information. We continue to carry out these projects through wonderful collaborations and partnerships linking campus and community as well as the local with the global.
Please don’t forget that your support is vital to our ongoing efforts. Please visit the Inside the Greenhouse Gift Fund to provide a tax-deductible gift. We are grateful for contributions in any amount. Read more …
Bernie Sanders’ climate plan, one of the biggest of the already big climate plans, dropped Thursday.
The strategy (which is the largest by strictly financial measures) outlines ambitious and politically radical change, including a rapid transition from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and geothermal power over the next decade. But that unprecedented effort is precisely what leading climate scientists emphasize is required to avoid the ever-worsening consequences of a relentlessly heating globe. “Limiting warming to 1.5 C (or 2.7 Fahrenheit above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures) is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” Jim Skea, a leading IPCC scientist, said last year.
Sanders’ $16.3 trillion plan, formally called the Green New Deal, follows in the footsteps of robust democratic climate or climate-related plans put forward by the likes of Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, former candidate Jay Inslee, and Joe Biden. Sanders calls for a national transformation on the scale of America’s mobilization during the New Deal and World War II, ultimately leading to a complete decarbonization of the nation’s economy in three decades, by 2050.
The plan is imperfect. But it captures the scope of what is needed to limit the planet’s warming to manageable levels.
“This kind of ambition gets us into the ballpark that’s commensurate with the scale of the challenge,” said Max Boykoff, the director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Sanders’ plan looks to the looming years and decades ahead, well beyond what’s feasible today, Boykoff added
“If you wrote a plan that pivoted on feasibility, rather than ambition, I think you’d have a pretty paltry proposal,” he said.
One of the first major goals of Sanders’ plan — to produce all the nation’s electricity with renewable sources by 2030 — will require an extraordinary transformation. For context, around 90 percent of all the nation’s wind and solar energy has come online since 2008, explained Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University.
“Despite that enormous investment in the past decade, wind and solar combine to produce about 10 percent of U.S. electricity today,” said Peskoe. “Bernie proposes to build an order of magnitude more capacity in the next decade.”
What’s more, power generated from geothermal energy, the third major renewable resource in Bernie’s plan, has remained mostly flat for about 30 years, Peskoe noted.
Herein lies a notable problem with Sanders’ carbon-free climate plan. It throws out the use of nuclear energy, which produces no heat-trapping carbon emissions. The plan calls for stopping the construction of new nuclear plants and prohibiting lease renewals on existing plants. But nuclear energy generated nearly 20 percent of the nation’s energy in 2018. It’s a giant part of the carbon-free energy equation.
“I haven’t seen a single U.S. decarbonization study that credibly shows net-zero [carbon emissions] by 2030 without keeping existing nuclear power online,” said Narayan Subramanian, a decarbonization expert studying climate policy at Columbia University.
But, the Sanders plan certainly doesn’t underestimate all the massive changes required to completely decarbonize the nation by “at least 2050.”
The plan, emphasized the University of Colorado Boulder’s Boykoff, “puts real Americans front and center,” specifically by calling for the creation of a whopping 20 million jobs as the nation builds and runs a slew of renewable power plants, develops sustainable agriculture, and maintains crumbling infrastructure around the country. Critically, the plan will prioritize job placement for workers displaced from the fossil fuel industry (like coal miners), so they aren’t left behind.
This emphasis on quality jobs is how the plan could potentially engender some bipartisan support in a deeply, embarrassingly polarized Congress. “That’s what is needed to get through this polarization,” said Boykoff.
The plan also has pretty thorough strategies for electrifying the transportation sector, noted Subramanian. This is imperative for reducing carbon emissions, as the transportation sector is the leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. “We will invest in nationwide electric vehicle charging infrastructure, to increase access to these resources for all, just as we built an interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s,” the plan says. Read more …
This summer, CSTPR’s own David Oonk is working with the Center for a New Energy Economy (CNEE) to make the communication of climate research to policy makers a little bit easier. CNEE is headed by Colorado’s 41st Governor, Bill Ritter, Jr. and was formed to help the government create policies that steer the United States in the direction of clean energy.
“They do a lot of information synthesis. They build out dashboards, really helpful information centers. They run workshops, all trying to connect the technical information around energy policy to decision-makers,” said Oonk. “They’re trying to better inform energy policy-related decisions.”
CNEE, founded in 2011, is a department of Colorado State
University. Oonk is excited about the variety of topics he’ll be working on as
one of the graduate interns.
“Since I’ve been spending so much time on natural gas and
fossil fuel related policy, I’m interested in building out some more expertise
on renewable energy policies and energy financing policies,” said Oonk.
Oonk is a graduate student in the Atlas Institute, where he studies oil and gas development and policy in Colorado.
Photo credit: David Oonk.
“The case study I’m looking at right now is hydraulic fracturing in the Front Range,” he said. “I’m trying to understand decision making around it. I’m also trying to understand its implications for our energy transitions because of climate change, and the air quality risks and impacts that we’re experiencing: how do we measure them, what are the uncertainties, and how do we make decisions about them.”
Oonk makes the point that many of the health impacts of
fracking are hard to measure, but must certainly be considered when policy
decisions about the process are made. It’s hard to see the toxic effects of benzene
and ozone (both emitted during the process of fracking) as a civilian, but policy
makers should be aware of them when considering fracking legislation.
“There is an interesting tension between the requirement of
science, measurement, and instruments to measure what is going on, and the
serious health questions around it,” said Oonk.
In fact, he is generally interested in studying the large impacts of nearly invisible things. As well as the effects of fracking on air quality, Oonk is also studying the tiny pieces of plastic that end up in our mountain streams—microplastics. Along with Patrick Chandler, another graduate student in CSTPR, he is measuring these microplastics in Rocky Mountain streams.
“We’re essentially going to monitor a bunch of streams around the Front Range, up and down watersheds,” said Oonk. ‘We want to see, one: if microplastics are present, which the pilot study suggests that they are; and, two: what plastics are in there, and what concentrations they’re at.”
He will also be working with Chandler to display this
information in a way that is engaging, artistic, and informative.
“We’re doing all the data collection and analysis this summer, and then in addition to that, we’re doing an exhibit that is going to be up in CU’s Sustainability, Energy and Environment Community (SEEC) sometime this Fall,” he said. “That will be a photography, sound and video multimedia exhibit.”
Photo credit: David Oonk.
Oonk and Chandler’s goal is to make the prevalence and
problems of microplastics visible to the naked eye.
“One of the goals of the art is to bring the microscopic,
invisible world, make it perceptible, and make it emotive,” said Oonk. “We’re
trying to elicit some reaction to the fact that our reach as a species, our
pollution as a species, is so great that even the areas we think are still
pristine are in fact infected by our plastic use.”
Oonk’s work shows us how important it is to find a way to
explain or display the impact of things we can’t see or appreciate. The more we
can understand the small changes, the more we can anticipate and alleviate the
more damaging changes that follow. From air quality as a result of fracking to
the insidious prevalence of microplastics, David Oonk is helping us understand
the big impact of imperceptible things.
Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre Internship Program by Sarah Posner
Sarah Posner is the 2019 Junior Researcher in the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCRCCC) program. She is a graduate student in human geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests are in food security, health, rural livelihoods, and vulnerability to climate change. In Nairobi, Sarah will support work on development of impact based forecasts in Kenya that will be used to trigger early action before extreme drought events that occur.
The time is flying by and I can’t believe I am already halfway through my placement at the Kenya Red Cross headquarters in Nairobi. Over the past two weeks, the office has been relatively quiet as most officers and interns were attending various workshops and meetings elsewhere in the country. While the solitude was a nice change of pace for the time being, I am happy that most of the office has returned this week. I missed sipping my morning chai in the company of my desk mates and spending lunch breaks sharing laughs over full plates of pilau at nearby tented restaurants. These small moments shared with my colleagues are the memories I will cherish most from my time working here at the Kenya Red Cross Society.
Over the past several weeks, I have worked closely with the data preparedness team on Forecast Based Financing (FbF), compiling various data sources of various drought impacts. We also conducted some preliminary analysis of the historical trends over time, with the aim of better informing an objective prioritization of which impacts are most significant, based upon data availability while addressing its limitations. Today marked a turning point in the project, as today I presented the findings of this research conducted thus far, along with my colleague Naomi, at the Technical Working Group (TWG) meeting. The TWG meets monthly and is comprised of technical experts who represent different disaster intervention institutions who are key stakeholders in the decision-making process. Some of the representatives in the room today included: the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD), the National Disaster Management Unit (NDMU), and National Disaster Operations Center (NDOC), to name a few.
Prior to the meeting, each stakeholder ranked thirteen drought impacts in order of what they considered to be of most significance. The scores were averaged and ranked by the data team and presented at the TWG which were discussed further in small group discussions. The top five for drought in descending order of significance were: 1) food insecurity, 2) outbreak of water and vector-borne disease, 3) water scarcity, 4) malnutrition, and 5) resource-based conflict. Many of the stakeholders were surprised by this ranking, with many individuals expecting to see such impacts as livestock death or reduced crop yield, which relate to rural livelihoods, ranked higher on the list. This led to a reflective discussion about the prioritization process, which was based upon the knowledge base and personal experiences of participants mostly from urban areas. Hence, it would be of interest to repeat the exercise to include other participants dependent on rural livelihoods to see how the rankings would change. Read more …
Reporting on latest science around climate change and land use focused on rich nations’ eating habits, but did it miss the bigger picture?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is widely regarded as the gold standard of climate science. But is the world’s media paying attention to it?
Last week’s IPCC report on land use may not have turned out to be the headline-generating machine that the 2018 report on limiting warming to 1.5C was; nor did it go unnoticed. The scope for stories was wide, with co-chair Jim Skea telling Climate Home News the paper was “the most complicated thing I’ve ever been involved with”.
While some journalists picked up on trade-offs between carbon storage and food production, the importance of indigenous land rights or sustainable farming practices, one theme dominated: meat.
Led by western media, the majority of coverage focused on the environmental impact of readers’ steak habits – even in countries where vegetarian diets are dictated by financial constraints or spiritual practice, not consumer preference.
Despite being the first IPCC report with a majority of authors from the developing world, few news outlets in poorer countries dedicated space to it. What little reporting filtered through was largely based on the IPCC press release or newswire copy, rather than highlighting the stark implications of the science for vulnerable communities.
AFP led with “Can we eat Big Macs and still avoid climate chaos?”, summarising that “not everyone needs to become a vegetarian, much less vegan, to keep the planet from overheating, but it would probably make things a lot easier if they did.” Reuters also attempted to capture that nuance, writing “although the report stopped short of explicitly advocating going meat free, it called for big changes to farming and eating habits to limit the impact of population growth and changing consumption patterns on stretched land and water resources.”
In the UK, The Times called on the reader to “Eat less meat to save the Earth”, while in the Guardian leftist commentator George Monbiot hit out at the IPCC for “[understating] the true carbon cost of our meat and dairy habits”. It provoked a backlash from British farming unions, who lamented “biased” and “selective” reporting of the science.
Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine had a similar focus, describing it the report as “a thorn in the flesh” (the word “fleisch” also meaning meat). Spanish online magazine Economía Digital warned the report would worsen the dire state of the national meat sector, which has suffered from declining demand in the past decade.
The focus on diet isn’t without its problems, Max Boykoff, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and a seasoned observer on climate coverage, told Climate Home News.
“Some of these ways in which certain outlets can choose to focus in on the individual can serve to distract and simply displace in a finite news hole those larger scale stories that need attention: the revolutionising of our agricultural practices, the way we manage our forests,” Boykoff said.
“Yes, [eating habits] are the way we come into contact with the environment most frequently. But to stay in that place is to atomise and limit the possibilities for making the kind of changes that are needed.” It also gave “corporations a free pass”, he said. Read more …
photo above: An image of the Alaskan wilderness where Ryan Vachon and Dan Zietlow filmed Adventures in Science and Cloven.
Do you remember when your teacher would roll out the gigantic TV and you would turn to your friends and whisper, “Yes! Movie day!”? Of course, because these were the days you got to watch a movie instead of doing worksheets. But to your chagrin, when the movie started it was almost more boring than regular class and you would just listen to a “dude in a lab coat pontificate” on and on about a subject that simply didn’t matter to you. Fortunately, those days have changed thanks to Dan Zietlow and Ryan Vachon, the creators and founders of Provare Media (pronounced ‘pro-vare-ay’), a film production company specializing in science communication and the effortless combination of art and science, whose program Adventures in Science was nominated for a 2018 regional Emmy award. Dan and Ryan both received their PhD’s from the University of Colorado Boulder and are currently both CSTPR Research Affiliates.
Adventures in Science is Vachon’s “pet project”, a television series for youths, aimed at middle schoolers, ages 9-14. In 2014, Vachon worked with the Rocky Mountain PBS to create a pilot and it was nominated for an Emmy Award back in 2015, but PBS simply didn’t have the bandwidth to support this project. After this set-back, Vachon let Adventures in Science take the back burner to other science outreach projects, but then, Zietlow came onto the scene.
Dan Zietlow who always had a passion for both science and art– double-majoring in physics and art history in undergraduate, found Vachon on the suggestion of a colleague of his who noted both his and Vachon’s passion for science outreach and film-making. Zietlow reached out to Vachon, and they immediately became a powerful creative force. Together, they embody the concept of STEAM’N– Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Nature an acronym important to both of them as artists and scientists. With Zietlow at the head of photography, Vachon executive producing, and both acting as editors, Adventures in Science was brought back as a passion project.
Determined to make the show a reality, Vachon reached out to contacts at The University of Alaska Anchorage, where fellow University of Colorado alum Kathy Kelsey and Jeff Welker in ecosystem’s biology were writing a proposal for the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how the changing climate is affecting patterns in vegetation and what the knock-on effect of changing vegetation patterns are on migratory caribou. As with all NSF grants, a ‘broader impacts’ statement must be made. According to NSF director, France Córdova in a 2014 speech, the broader impacts statement’s purpose is, “to engage the public in order to help improve the understanding of the value of basic research and why our projects are worthy of investment.” Vachon, Zietlow and Welker saw the concept of Adventures in Science as the perfect project to fit into the broader impacts statement, so they were written into the grant. When the grant was successfully funded, Zietlow and Vachon had the chance to go to Alaska multiple times to film on the northern slopes and near the oil fields. Welker wanted films about this subject to be accessible to both adults and children, so Provare Media was tasked with making two films utilizing the same materials—a television series for youths entitled Adventures in Science and a documentary for adults, called Cloven.
Ryan Vachon working in Alaska as a part of the NSF funded grant submitted by Jeff Welker and Kathy Kelsey at The University of Alaska Anchorage.
Cloven is a 20-minute documentary aimed at science-interested adults, which investigates the impacts of climate change on vegetation patterns and consequently, the impacts on caribou migration. It is more like a traditional documentary, where they follow and interview the scientists involved in the methodology of the experimentation. Vachon and Zietlow hope that this will encourage adults to think outside their personal expertise and perspectives and to help them understand that science isn’t just a cerebral exercise but is something they can engage and interact with. This film is now submitted to the Banff, Whistler, Anchorage, Boulder International, and other film festivals for 2020. While the adult documentary is focused on understanding how scientists go about answering the questions about the interplay between climate change, vegetation, and migratory caribou, the youth-version of Adventures in Science will be about comprehending exactly what the question is and why we’re asking it.
Dan Zietlow conducting an interview for Adventures in Science.
The pilot episode for the youths, Adventures in Science – How Caribou Survive Arctic Winters, is a 26-minute documentary-style show, filmed in Alaska, “designed for classroom use, informal use, and sparking that interest in science” according to Zietlow. Their work, although an artistic achievement in its own right, is also a monument to new tools in science education—such as ‘peer-to-peer learning’. This is a unique idea in science education, and hinges on the idea that if “somebody who looks like you and is roughly the same age as you is exploring these things and asking these questions, you are much more likely to engage with that knowledge and be curious about it yourself”, as Zietlow explained. To deploy peer-to-peer learning, Vachon and Zietlow recruited students from Broomfield Heights Middle School to act, explain concepts, and interact with the scientists in the documentary.
Zietlow wants watchers of Adventures in Science not just to learn the science, but to understand the importance of respecting the land around us, “We are stewards of this land, we need to take care of it, we need to understand it.” There is an importance that cannot be neglected any longer in making youths aware of the fact that while we love nature, we also have an undeniable impact on it— like the idea that the devices we use every day come directly from and thus directly impact nature. Seamlessly weaving together science, policy, art, human elements of the communities impacted by climate change, and ideas of the ‘human ecosystem’ is something that Provare Media is intent on achieving. Vachon sums up the objective of Provare Media and Adventures in Science succinctly with, “Creating informed, but curious and empowered, decision-makers is our goal.”
Carley Rutledge, an animator who owns Cool Cactus Media, Ryan Vachon, the actors from Broomfield Heights, and Dan Zietlow celebrating the finishing of filming Adventures in Science.
Provare Media is a new company, but its impacts are already far-reaching. PBS is interested in picking up Adventures in Science; How Caribou Survive Arctic Winters aired on select member stations, but many want it to be a series of four to five 30-minute episodes on a variety of subjects, not just a stand-alone episode. Vachon and Zietlow are in the midst of working to make this a reality and are “totally stoked” about reaching more people through both PBS and the word-of-mouth that comes with the Emmy Award nomination.
Provare is an Italian word meaning, ‘to try’, and that is what Provare Media is doing, “that’s the vision we’re working on, trying to communicate complexity in science and natural systems to different aspects of the public.” Provare media is trying to influence both youths and adults already interested in science, but who may have a fear of science, to make them more powerful and involved policy-influencing citizens. Zietlow clarifies, “Science is nothing more than asking the question “Why?” and being curious to find the answer. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to have a PhD or a Master’s to do any of this, you just have to be curious about the world around you and we’re trying to elicit that feeling in people.”
New Zealand political developments contributed to a 31% increase in coverage from the previous month.
July Monsoon rains, floods and consequent landslides gripped India and contributed to a 5% increase in media coverage of climate change from June 2019.
July 2019 media coverage of climate change in Germany continued to rise like the mercury in the thermometer in continental Europe: it was up 9% from June and has been rising since April 2019.
US television news coverage dropped 37% in July 2019, from the previous month’s numbers. CNN in particular dropped nearly 50%. Perhaps coverage of the ‘horse race’ for the Democratic nomination for US President displaced some attention in the finite CNN news hole.
July media attention to climate change and global warming continued through ecological/meteorological, political, economic, scientific and cultural themes. Of note, New Zealand political developments contributed to a 31% increase in coverage from the previous month. Also, July Monsoon rains, floods and consequent landslides gripped India and contributed to a 5% increase in media coverage of climate change from June 2019 (along with an overall doubling of the amount of media coverage of climate change in India since April 2019). Meanwhile, July 2019 media coverage of climate change in Germany continued to rise like the mercury in the thermometer in continental Europe: it was up 9% from June and has been rising since April 2019. However, United States (US) television news coverage dropped 37% in July 2019, from the previous month’s numbers. CNN in particular dropped nearly 50%. Perhaps coverage of the ‘horse race’ for the Democratic nomination for US President displaced some attention in the finiteCNN news hole, despite the many new stories described below.
Figure 1 shows trends in newspaper media coverage in India – from January 2000 through July 2019.
United Kingdom (UK) media coverage has steadily increased over time. For instance, coverage in the first seven months in 2019 (January – July) has more than doubled from the first seven months of 2018. However, when these increases across outlets are disaggregated one can detect a slightly different set of trends. For example, stories in The Guardian (and Observer) and in The Times (and Sunday Times) ran the majority (55%) of climate change articles across these seven news outlets. Of note, the Daily Mail (and Mail on Sunday) accounted for just under 5% of overall newspaper stories in these seven UK news organizations (see Figure 2).
Ecological and meteorological content dominated overall media coverage throughout the month of July. Of note, Europe faced a number of heat waves in July that were tied to changes in the climate. Starting the month, records were set across the continent. Many stories documented the record-breaking heat. For example, journalist Rob Picheta from CNN reported on July 1, “Europe’s scorching heat wave expanded across the continent on Saturday, with people from Britain to the Balkans sweltering under abnormally high temperatures after a record-breaking week. France is expecting temperatures of 39 degrees Celsius (103 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts on Saturday, a day after it shattered its record mark multiple times in one day. Spain, which is dealing with the aftermath of a wildfire that tore through 10,000 acres of forest in the country’s north-east on Friday, is bracing for temperatures of up to 42 degrees, according to its national meteorological body AEMET. The country is still affected by a “mass of tropical wind coming from Africa,” the agency said. And the UK saw its hottest day of the year by some distance, with the mercury rising to 33 degrees Celsius (91.4 Fahrenheit) and threatening the country’s hottest-ever June mark of 35.6 degrees, set in 1976”. A few days later, reporter Doyle Rice from USA Today linked the high temperatures to the hottest global June on record. He noted, “Global warming exacerbated the heat wave that baked Europe late last week, a report released Tuesday said. The news came as a separate report said the globe sweltered to its hottest June on record. Europe’s heat wave, which included France’s all-time high temperature of 114.6 degrees last week, was “made more likely and more intense by human-induced climate change,” the World Weather Attribution group said in a release. They also said this is true for every heat wave in Europe nowadays. Specifically, the report said the extreme conditions from June 26-28 in Toulouse, France, were as much as 10 times more likely now than they were in 1900, before greenhouse gas emissions from industry had a major effect on the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into our atmosphere, which has warmed the planet to levels that cannot be explained by natural causes”.
Also in early July, denizens along the US Gulf Coast braced for the impacts of Hurricane Barry to start the hurricane season. Just missing New Orleans, residents across the US state of Louisiana nonetheless were impacted. Numerous stories ran that tracked the storm and made links between hurricane events and climate change. For example, leading up to the storm making landfall, US National Public Radio journalist Rebecca Hersher reported, “People across southern Louisiana are spending the weekend worried about flooding. The water is coming from every direction: the Mississippi River is swollen with rain that fell weeks ago farther north, and a storm called Barry is pushing ocean water onshore while it drops more rain from above. It’s a situation driven by climate change, and one that Louisiana has never dealt with, at least in recorded history. And it’s raising questions about whether New Orleans and other communities are prepared for such an onslaught”. As a second example, journalists Kathy Finn and Timothy Gardner from Reuters wrote, “While no single storm can be linked directly to climate change, the trend of warming air and seas around the globe has caused conditions that scientists say will, on average, make storms stronger and rainier”. In the wake of the storm, New York Times journalist Christopher Flavelle reported, “New research shows that the extreme weather and fires of recent years, similar to the flooding that has struck Louisiana and the Midwest, may be making Americans sick in ways researchers are only beginning to understand. By knocking chemicals loose from soil, homes, industrial-waste sites or other sources, and spreading them into the air, water and ground, disasters like these — often intensified by climate change — appear to be exposing people to an array of physical ailments including respiratory disease and cancer … The movement of toxic substances by storms and wildfires joins a long list of threats that climate change poses to Americans’ health, whether they be more severe heat waves or the spread of dengue or other ailments previously restricted to the tropics. What makes this threat different, researchers say, is the ability of many contaminants to persist in the environment or in people’s bodies after the disaster has passed, and to accumulate in with each new storm or fire”. Read more …
RSS
MeCCO Monthly Summary: ‘I am an environmentalist’
Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
August 2019 Summary
August media attention to climate change and global warming was up 20% throughout the world from the previous month of July, and up almost 83% from August 2018.
At the country level, of note Australian coverage was up nearly 62%, Canadian coverage was up nearly 38%, United States (US) coverage was up over 32% and New Zealand coverage was up slightly by just over 3%.
August media attention to climate change and global warming was up 20% throughout the world from the previous month of July, and up almost 83% from August 2018. At the regional level, from the previous month of July 2019 coverage in Asia was up nearly 14%, the European Union was up nearly 6%, North American coverage was up just over 32%, Latin American coverage was up almost 53%, African coverage was up over 8% and Oceania coverage was up approximately 33%. At the country level, of note Australian coverage was up nearly 62%, Canadian coverage was up nearly 38%, United States (US) coverage was up over 32% and New Zealand coverage was up slightly by just over 3%.
Figure 1 shows trends in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January 2004 through July 2019.
For a second straight month, ecological and meteorological content significantly shaped overall media coverage. Of note, in early August TheWashington Post published a set of analyses of how climate change has impacted communities and counties around the United States (US). Washington Post journalists Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens reported, “Over the past two decades, the 2 degrees Celsius number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth’s average temperature increases “well below” 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes. The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all the world’s coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear. But global warming does not heat the world evenly. A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark. Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark. Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 2 degrees Celsius. Other parts of the Northeast — New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts — trail close behind. While many people associate global warming with summer’s melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states”.
Figure 2. Word cloud showing frequency of words invoked in media coverage of climate change or global warming in United States newspaper sources in August (top left) – from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post – Canadian sources (top right) – from The Globe and Mail,The Toronto Star, and National Post, as well as Australian sources (bottom left) – from The Sydney Morning Herald, Courier Mail & Sunday Mail, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, and The Age, and New Zealand sources (bottom right) – from The New ZealandHerald, The Dominion Post, and The Press.
In August, media coverage also focused on the record-breaking heat from the month before. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that July 2019 was the hottest month of any month on record on planet Earth. NOAA also reported that June 2019 was the hottest June on record. Many news stories covered these milestones. For example, journalist Sophie Lewis from CBS News reported, “This summer hasn’t just felt like the hottest ever — it actually has been. July 2019 is now officially the hottest month on record, since record-keeping began 140 years ago. The average global temperature last month was 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Thursday. It follows the hottest June ever recorded, marking one of the hottest summers in recent history. Previously, July 2016 held the record for the hottest month ever. As of now, 2019 is tied with 2017 as the second-warmest year on record”. Meanwhile, journalist Robert Lee Hotz from The Wall Street Journal wrote “This past July was the hottest month world-wide in more than a century of global record-keeping, with severe heat waves in Europe, Africa and parts of the U.S. boosting the overall global average temperature”.
Also in August, wildfires in the Amazon – and their links to a changing climate – generated global media attention. An increase of 83% from the previous year had many asking questions and connecting the dots between Brazilian forest management and climate change. For example, BBC reported, “Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has seen a record number of fires this year, new space agency data suggests. The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) said its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018. It comes weeks after President Jair Bolsonaro sacked the head of the agency amid rows over its deforestation data. The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon is a vital carbon store that slows down the pace of global warming. It is also home to about three million species of plants and animals, and one million indigenous people”. Meanwhile, journalist N’dea Yancey-Bragg from the USA Today wrote, “Forest fires in the Amazon are generating smoke that can be seen from space and may have caused a daytime blackout more than 1,700 miles away in the country’s largest city. In the middle of the day Monday, the sky above São Paulo was blanketed by smoke from the wildfires raging in the Amazon region, according to local media reports. The smoke resulting from some of these wildfires was also captured in satellite images released by NASA last week”.
Moreover, as the fires continued through August, media reports covered how Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was mishandling the ongoing situation. Among numerous stories, journalist Marcelo Silva de Sousa, reporting for the Associated Press, wrote, “Amid global concern about raging fires in the Amazon, Brazil’s government complained Thursday that it is being targeted in smear campaign by critics who contend President Jair Bolsonaro is not doing enough to curb widespread deforestation. The threat to what some call “the lungs of the planet” has ignited a bitter dispute about who is to blame during the tenure of a leader who has described Brazil’s rainforest protections as an obstacle to economic development and who traded Twitter jabs on Thursday with France’s president over the fires. French President Emmanuel Macron called the wildfires an international crisis and said the leaders of the Group of 7 nations should hold urgent discussions about them at their summit …” Journalist Erik Ortiz from NBC News reported, “Environmental groups have blamed the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in January, for rolling back environmental protections that have paved the way for the illegal clearing of forests in favor of cattle farming and agriculture. On Wednesday, Bolsonaro posted a video to Facebook blaming nongovernmental organizations for setting the blazes as a tactic to malign him, although he provided no evidence for the claim”. Read more …